Fiction - John Grisham - The Testament (1999)

I've never really endeavored to read what I call a "beach book"--that is, a book that comes out usually around summer and is a bestseller because it is a lot of action and little thought, meant to be read on airplanes and on shores by vacationers. I haven't read Dan Brown, and I never read John Grisham until now.

Technically, this book is Bryan's. He bought it for his Modern Literature class. I guess the teacher had him underline a line in the first chapter: "The money is the root of my misery."

This has little to do with the book, but I'm going to dig into this subject anyway. Bryan's ModLit teacher was a dumbass. For one thing, this book came out in '99 and we graduated in '04. There is no fucking way that this book could be called modern literature. At the very best, it would be contemporary literature, and the use of the L word would be shaky at best. Modern is from about 1850ish to about 1950ish. Everything else after is contemporary. My ModLit teacher had a giant girl boner for the Harlem Renaissance, and we never really got much farther than that. For the next thing, Grisham is not literature. It's a beach book. Sold in airports and convenience stores in coastal towns. That sentence is not a theme for the book at all, and not just because this book doesn't have a theme, other than things always work out for everyone. It's fiction, sure. Lawyer fiction, absolutely. Action? Well, there's a plane and boat crash, so I might be able to grant you that. Literature? Fuck no.

So why did I read it? I hate the fact that there is a book in my collection that I won't read, even if I know going into it that it's not going to be the deepest of stories. And it really isn't.

Some old rich guy makes a handwritten will that cuts all of his legitimate children off and hands his billions to an illegitimate daughter in Brazil who is a missionary and couldn't care less. Then he kills himself. Enter the law firm that fixed up all his other wills. They have to uphold it, even though the legitimate children are swooping in to say that the guy was not in his right mind, he didn't know what he was doing, give me some goddamned money motherfucker. They have to find the girl, so they send someone in their firm that's yanked out of rehab for alcoholism and send him to Brazil to find her.

In On Writing by Stephen King, he mentions that many books that people read on planes or whatever are for people who don't read. They have the book because otherwise they would be reading a magazine or sleeping. But when someone makes a mention of them reading a novel, they feel shame and say, "Yeah, but I'm learning so much about Subject X from this book." Because apparently reading is shameful in today's society.

The bulk of The Testament is a foray down the rivers and swamps of southeastern Brazil, and a huge exploration of the culture, climate, and geography there. The chapters are studded with Portuguese words for things we have our own words for, and explorations into how the residents live day to day and feel about Americans and their own Indians. In any other context, I might have been interested by it, but it was clear to me that Grisham was putting it in to teach the reader something, so they could point to the book and say what they learned from it, rather than how it resonated with them. Because it doesn't.

I didn't like this, if you couldn't tell. The whole thing was one predictable development after another, and at no point does it make the reader have to accept anything hard. Nothing particularly difficult happens, and the conflict itself is asinine. Not to mention that a super rich old guy bitching about having too much money sounds like whining on the part of the author.

If you don't like your wads of cash from your mediocre books, hand it over to me. I'm sure I could make a home for it.

3.5/10